‘Your grandad used to say beer was 90% water and 10% magic’
It’s the Pride versus The Bride! this week when it comes to new releases that don’t feature beavers and body-hopping tech.
If Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale as undead star-crossed lovers don’t take your fancy, perhaps a tale of a ‘little microbrewery that could’ might fit the bill for you, coinciding nicely with the rugby, which has seen pubs packed full of fans. They’ll have been watching in the village of Birchbury, too, I’d wager – a cosy little patch of the Somerset countryside where two pubs, both alike in dignity, vie for the loyal custom of the townsfolk, fighting a literal beer brawl that will see one crowned The Best British Ale EverTM and the other chopped liver.
Hotshot pop-star Cal Harley returns home to his rural roots to try and rekindle his relationship with his estranged father and brother after his mother’s passing, but finds the family pub – The Drover’s Inn – on the verge of bankruptcy. It’s up to Cal and Co. to try and turn things around, armed with good old gramps’ recipe for brewing a good beer (as well as his famed ‘brewstick’, which looks barnacled enough to have come off of The Flying Dutchman).
Martin Clunes stars as Mick, the father and landlord struggling to keep everything thing together with The Inbetweeners’ James Buckley as the earnest younger brother who stayed behind to pitch in. There’s a tricky history for Cal to navigate – butting up against his old rival, the hideously posh Pritchard who’s now dating his childhood flame – but this scrappy story has the potential to turn things around and bring this little community (and Cal’s distant family) together like never before.
This all comes from the team behind 2019’s Fisherman’s Friends, which found its niche as a well-meaning comedy with a Cornish, postcard-esque backdrop and a sense of good old-fashioned British togetherness. In that way, Mother’s Pride is just about more of the same, though perhaps less effective than its predecessor. It’s a very simple film with few, if any, surprises and its narrative arcs bring to mind that Cornish landscape with how obviously they’re telegraphed ahead of time, like a ferry appearing on the horizon and blaring the horn as it crosses the final stretch of the Channel into port, but the cast give it a good bit of welly and despite a fair few of the jokes falling rather flat, it’s not without its charms – I did laugh.
Clunes does well as the slightly ill-tempered father who’s prone to punching anyone who ticks him off, but ultimately has the best intentions for his family and friends. This is still a comedy at the end of the day, but his family is in a tough stretch of time and the moments where this is properly acknowledged are the best in the film; touching rather than schmaltzy. Mark Addy echoes a bit of his performance in Game of Thrones as the hard-drinking, happy regular – one of those ‘uncles’ of the family who aren’t blood relatives, but may as well be. He’ll threaten to shove a stick where the sun doesn’t shine (‘And I don’t mean Bristol’) one minute, then be quoting Shakespeare the next (oddly enough, this is the second film of the week to make clear Romeo and Juliet parallels).
It’s massively by-the-numbers stuff – more of a light beer than anything that’ll put you under the table – and there’s a shiny sense of unreality to it (CGI bees make an odd appearance and the third act rests on the tension of whether a carriage will arrive in London in time; if not, the boys’ll be horse drawn and quartered) but you know what you’re getting when you buy a ticket for a film like this one. It didn’t seem to me like anything particularly noteworthy – I don’t do well with this sort of thing; I must admit, I had a slight sense of queasiness as we reached the film’s more saccharine moments – but the crowd in the screening laughed a lot, so if it’s up your alley (or your dad’s), I think you’ll find enough of what you’re looking for, hang-ups or hangovers be damned.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate sex references, language, infrequent suicide references.
Mother’s Pride is in cinemas now.
